Apophysis Help Please

[Syates]

I love apophysis, always use the newest version, great program, but the long render times will kill me one day, does anybody here knows of some tricks to make it quicker? SY

[Clivia]

What method are you using now? I know of three, all very different.

[Syates]

I just render normally in Apophysis, my standard settings are Quality 4000, Filter Radius 0.4 Oversample, but I do a small test render first to see how it looks. I use Apophysis 2.07beta which is great. SY

[Clivia]

I am using version 2.02 (I must update it soon!), but it should be the same. I use similar parameters, but render by using the file/export flame command. It uses a different rendering engine, I am afraid I cannot remember what its called though.You can still select the same parameters. I find the speed and quality is much better than the render to disc command.
Another way to increase render speed is to increase the RAM available. I have 2gig of ram, but would like more.

[Syates]

I have 1gigRam, so feel fortunate  I used the export command in a previous version and it was faster, but know I can't find it anymore, if I hit crtl+x it tells me: "The flam3-render.exe renderer could not be found at a specified location. Please check your settings in Options>Paths>Export renderer." Eh, what does this mean? SY

[Clivia]

I have upgraded my version to check this. It means you have to download the flam3 renderer from www.flam3.com. Click the download tab, then click the Windows zip version.
The bad news is that it kept timing out on me before the download had finished. I am in work now, so I will take a longer look later when no one is going to look over my shoulder!

[Syates]

I have downloaded it fine, but where do I put it now? SY

[Clivia]

So far so good! I was able to download it this morning.
Put it into your Apophysis file for safe keeping.
Open Apophysis and go to Options then click the Paths tab.
See the line for Export renderer. Using the little file symbol at the side of that path. navigate to where you put Flam3, and click on Flam 3 render.
Its done!
It opens a command window to render. I tried it on a small render, and it worked fine.
I found a tutorial about using Flam3 to render animations. I don't do animations, but I would love to learn how. Ignore the installation bit at the beginning, we just did that!
http://electricsheep.org/apophysis/

[Syates]

First fractal is rendering, a monster that would normally take several days, I keep you posted how it goes, SY

[sshaw75]

hmm tried one like this last night, ended up with a black 3000x3000 square lol

[Syates]

hmm tried one like this last night, ended up with a black 3000x3000 square lol

Ooops, I only hope that don't happen with mine, did you figured out was the problem was? SY

[Clivia]

I just tried another render to test this. I saved it as a .png file with a transparent background. It worked fine. What did you save your black render as?

[sshaw75]

hmm I forgot about changing to png, I didn't notice the default was jpg.  Maybe that was it, will have to try it again tonight

[sshaw75]

well I tried again last night setting it to a png file, this time I got a 3000x3000 empty square.  Not quite sure what is happening.  I set the path to the flam3render.exe file, and use the same settings I usually do i rendering.  I do notice that the .flame file is being saved in the same location as the blank files.  When I export flame on small files (the standard 555 by whatever size) it seems to work ok?  Maybe this is a ram issue.  Guess I'll stick to the longer save to disk way

[Syates]

Did you discover what went wrong? After 3 days my monster has finished and looked nice (I rendered as a jpg), hope you find a solution soon, SY